As UKBF's Carl puts it: "There may be some mileage in renting out the kit.

Our Startup Snapshot series is all about highlighting businesses trying to create a positive change in the world.

You could argue that most small businesses are aiming for this; which is why this week we decided to pick a smaller business to write about, whose dream is simply to control their own destiny.

We spoke to the founders of True Start Performance Coffee, Signable and more about their experiences. Here Tom Cridland talks about how he built a fashion brand with a £6,000 government Start Up Loan, which now turns over 1m. Company Check founder Alastair Campbell looks at the season so far, including...

1) Why Deborah Meaden leads the pack 2) More money, less equity 3) And the worst and best of the bunch With season 14 of Dragons’ Den now on a break until the end of the year, it’s the perfect time to look back over the highlights and the major lessons that can be learnt from the last seven episodes.

I went through three co-founders in the first year, parted ways with my first key hire and hired for skills we weren’t ready for yet.

Each of these events had a significant impact on our strategy and pro...This is why teaching ESL was booming there; for anyone who had any semblance of ambition, the goal was to learn English, the golden ticket to getting out.The second thing you’ll notice is that Russian men are patriarchal alpha males, and, whatever your feminist textbook might have told you, this is initially a huge turn-on.And in that strange and romantic moment I thought, “One day I’m going to put this in a story to explain my convoluted relationship with Russian men.”I should preface this story by saying that I am Russian.I speak the language, I celebrate the holidays, and when I go back to New York after visiting relatives in the motherland and hand my Russian passport to the Russian customs official at border control, watch him quickly flip through it, and then haughtily sneer at me as he asks “, where’s your visa?Evolutionary theorists and Freudians alike would argue that women are subconsciously attracted to men who give off signs that they will provide for them.